Fuck.

That was my first, unwitting thought upon coming to, squinting under the assault of the sunlight filtering through half-closed blinds and burning a hole right through my face. I turn away instinctively, the sun warming my cheek, and mouth the word again, practically tasting the aggravation on my lips.

I yawn with a satisfying shiver, and the thought slips away like sand.

A dull thrum of electricity tickles the edges of my awareness. The air is crisp and artificial, lifeless and unwelcoming, and each icy breath burns my nostrils like dry winter air. Ignoring the wisps of light that slip through the cracks, the darkened room casts impassive shadows across the walls, the silence stretching on and on without a single chirp to interrupt it.

Lingering protests of exhaustion as I lay still in bed are apathetically shoved behind an assessment of today's schedule and whether the gasoline price—and bitter morning air—is worth the drive downtown for a breakfast croissant. The chill that drapes over my skin and makes me flinch answers for itself.

Get up, my brain whispers.

Go back to sleep, my heart says.

Feed me, my stomach groans.

With each second I spend listening to my heart, my brain nags me and my stomach mumbles.

The morning is, in that regard, a typical imitation of the mornings that came before it.

All is calm: an empty daydream regardless of the nagging feeling in my head. Untapped energy flows just beneath my skin, waiting to be woken up once the bed is far away and the coffee is slightly closer. Most mornings are the same—a battle between an empty mind and the will to finally get on with the day—so this comes off as simply routine. I let my mind wander, waiting for my eyes to fight a losing battle against the drowsiness that continues to cloud them, and I find myself staring up at the ceiling, unthinking, unwavering.

I bask in the false silence, in the barely noticeable rings and pings and groans that replace the usual chirping and echo around me like static until it eventually escapes my notice altogether, and let the tranquility of the morning guide me back to languor.

In the end, the lull of sleep supersedes reason. The coffee—and banishing the bone-deep exhaustion long enough to drag myself out of bed, as if I ever could without said coffee—can wait another few minutes.

At least this is what I like to tell myself as I drift away, knowing that I'll ultimately 'rest my eyes for a moment' only to miss the next dozen alarms I've preemptively set for this exact situation, rush out of the house without breakfast, and spend the rest of the day begging for my body to hit the mattress and the swift hand of blissful sleep to deliver the night faster.

Feed me, my stomach screams, louder and louder with each passing second. Feed me, feed me, feed me, feed me—!

I close my eyes and tell my stomach to shut up. Peace returns for as long as it takes to expel a single, tired breath, and it is stolen away just as easily.

From one heartbeat to the next, bright, obnoxious lights flicker to life above my head and cast a harsh glare across the room, washing away the soft sunrays that kissed my skin with gold and led me to believe that I could go relatively unbothered today.

A swear almost slips past my lips, but the disappearance of the quiet ambiance snaps me into focus.

I live alone.

I don't have automatic lights.

But more importantly, I live alone.

All the gears in my head screech to a halt.

My blood runs cold, and then it drains away altogether the instant I realize this room, now free from the shadows that concealed every detail of it, isn't mine. The rude odor of every cubic inch of air hits me with the full force of a tank, and the static noises that disappeared from notice earlier suddenly seem deafening.

What the—

It takes only a few seconds for the earth-shattering reveal to steal my breath away, for bottomless horror to pull the rug from under my feet, for disorientation to sink its claws deep into my flesh.

Whatever clarity I clung to dissipates into thin air when I try to move but can't, though not for lack of trying but, rather, an inability to. Something overtakes me: a cold epiphany that strikes me silent as my eyes travel lower and are greeted by a body that clearly isn't mine. The sight is sickening.

I see 'my' leg kicking beneath the blanket and watch 'my' arms struggling to free themselves. I feel the texture of coarse fabric against 'my' skin, rubbing the strangely delicate flesh to the point of rawness. Are these not 'my' fingers pinching or 'my' toes curling? Are the strange sounds of panic and choking not from 'my' throat?

I let out a shuddering breath and hear traces of voice that can't be mine, hysteria bubbling to the forefront.

This may possibly be the worst M. Night Shyamalan plot twist in the history of ever. In the background, the stupid beeps and pings that didn't bother me before begin to grate on my nerves. Now that I've noticed them, I can't not notice them.

I strain to raise my hands to my face, uncoordinated to be kind, unfamiliar to be honest. It takes a few tries to get the motions right, pinching and pulling at skin as though to peel off an uncomfortable layer of plastic.

There are three fundamental things I take note of after I've pushed down the initial wave of panic: My hands are tiny. My face is unbearably squishy. Neither of these were true when I went to sleep last night.

The hopeless disparity between what is and what isn't divorces me from the present, and the things I've always known and the things I shouldn't but somehow do gravitate together, leaving me with a feeling so terrible that I honestly don't think words could describe it in all of its flaming glory.

An intrusion in the room catches my eye, taking immediate precedence over the fact that the body I woke up with is not the body I went to sleep in. The silhouette of an emerging figure draws closer until they practically loom over me, shadowing my eyes from the blinding lights. My heart, already pushed to its utmost limits, hammers away without any regard for my blood pressure. My mouth hangs open, but I don't fuss, too stunned for even that.

I hold my breath as if it would suddenly make me invisible.

An imposing face concealed only by a surgical mask—he's going to cut me open, I think, the memories of every horror movie I've ever watched coming to mind at the worst possible time, and he'll probably keep me awake for every second of it—stares back at my petrified form with eyes full of uncanny familiarity. My stomach flips.

I start when his eyes meet mine, mesmerizing, curious. I barely think to look away. I don't, not when some unknown force compels me simply look, not when I can't discern the exact color of his eyes and feel the gears in my head start back up because of it. It's not hazel. Not amber. Not quite gray. Something light, something pure, something—gold. Gold; like the sun incarnated, like the hidden treasures of old that drove men mad with greed, like the apple that begot the Trojan War.

But eyes can't be golden.

I make the fatal mistake of not looking away, and my brain does the stupid thing—he's an alien who wants to burst out from my chest, a government agent who plans to dissect me like some child's cruel science project, a psychopath who kidnapped me and put me in his basement, a monster ready to chew me up and boil my bones for soup—before I can stop it. The longer I stare, the more unnerved I become.

Gloved hands reach down and scoop me up from the bed—a stark, white cradle that I could've taken for bricks all along, I realize now that the lights are on. They overpower my efforts to scramble away, pushing aside the scratchy blanket that I took for granted as shelter from the unknown.

I fumble for something—anything—reaching out with slow, clumsy hands. Anything that could calm me down slips through my fingers: intangible, invisible, or absent altogether.

I pound against hard flesh with all my measly might, but I only manage to bruise my hands in the process. As if to add insult to injury, wires I hadn't noticed until now peeking out from the holes of my onesie tug at my skin from where they've adhered all over my chest. The wires knot at the slightest effort I make to move, tangling the more I squirm.

Cold sweat prickles my skin as I struggle with every little breath, sometimes holding out in hopes of still being able to turn invisible. I feel like throwing up, but I just barely avoid it.

I'm helpless to watch as gloved fingers pick apart the knots. The words—if such primitive sounds could even be called that—that awkwardly spill from my lips involve more whimpering and stuttering than I care to admit, and I'm hushed with some incoherent babble in return.

Once my legs are free, as if driven by instinct alone, I kick the closest thing with it: his face. He barely even flinches.

He glances back at my face, his eyes crinkling when I attempt to say 'What the fuck is going on?' but, instead, gush saliva like a broken faucet and lament my smarting toes. The look on his face when he laughs makes me pause.

He looks and sounds so . . . human.

He lifts me up from under the arms in one fell swoop, and I nearly break my neck from the resulting whiplash. I scream something vicious with a voice I don't recognize as my own when he rests me against his chest, my heart ready to burst free from the confines of my ribs. I throw up a little. I immediately swallow it down, self-loathing stronger than ever.

Instead of doing whatever terrible thing my mind can conjure up on the spot from a movie I saw ages ago, all he does is whisper some nonsense into my ear. It's downright creepy at first, but my body responds to it with a bizarre zeal, becoming boneless and pliable against my will the instant I let my guard down. My shrieks slow to a halt, my whines fading into a quiet grumble, taking with it all of my energy but none of my concern. His touch chases away the conviction for defiance that had so readily been thrown around and leaves nothing short of exhaustion in its place.

He rocks me and rubs soothing circles against my back as the seconds and minutes crawl by. My eyelids grow heavier, begging for sleep if only to get away from this horrible nightmare. Thinking about anything other than the rise and fall of his chest against mine or the delicate balance between this being a fever dream or an actual case of clinical insanity becomes an impossible challenge, but I manage through sheer willpower alone.

When I try to think of a time before this mess, I can't recall anything but this warm, gentle touch that cocoons me sweetly and evokes a special kind of nausea from the way this body thirsts for it despite common sense telling me not to. In fact, I can hardly remember what I was doing yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that—

He pulls away and trains his eyes on my face again, startling me. I flinch, expecting something to happen. He might hit me. He might drop me. He might snarl or bite or pinch for all I know. I brace for the worst.

He murmurs something and bounces me lightly, each jolt eliciting a sharp flinch. I can't understand his words, not that he bothers elaborating. The motion sickness is a formidable enemy I push down with all my might.

In the end, I throw up all over him, staining his shirt with putrid, off-white gunk. He cleans it off my face like it's no one's business, chafing my lips and chin with the other side of a cheap napkin he wiped the sick from his shirt with. Unsurprisingly, the sharp taste of vomit does not make the situation any better.

Everyone has off days, right? I keep repeating in my head, a mantra that keeps me sane as my rapid-fire thoughts spin me around and around. I dare take a peek at my body again. It reaffirms my distress: tiny legs, tiny arms, a million wires stuck to my chest, and a bit of drool dripping down my puke-encrusted shirt.

Really, really off days, I think, though it sounds even less believable the umpteenth time.

The blankets are flat and without warmth when he puts me back down—too soon, my mind whispers, not yet—and the hands that retract so painstakingly fast take with them all the security and comfort I had clung to since opening my eyes. Panic returns, only noiseless this time.

My mouth tastes acrid. My eyes burn, trying to hold back the hysteria. My lips quiver. The only way this could possibly get any worse would be if I were to spontaneously burst into flames.

He doesn't leave immediately after setting me down but, rather, lingers by the edge of the cradle, humming something just under his breath that delights a strange nostalgia in my heart, though I can't remember a time when I've ever heard this tune before. He just stands there, leaning softly against the frame, looking down at me in a manner that makes me feel light and airy for some reason. I don't recognize his face, or what little of it I can see from beyond his mask, or his voice, but a part of me is drawn to him like a moth to a flame, diving towards my inevitable death.

Among the dizzying truths and overwhelming noises and endless amounts of drool, I see him the clearest. I stare at him because I consider it a better alternative to confronting the poor state of my body, and he stares back at me, and when I tilt my fat head, he tilts his head and smiles, and—I just—I laugh deliriously, and he laughs back at me like it's the funniest thing in the world, and—I don't know anymore.

Sooner or later, he moves on from simply staring at me like a lunatic to going through the familiar motions of checking my pulse and blood pressure, prying open my mouth, shining a flashlight in my eyes, looking in my ears, and so on and so forth. A clinical checkup before he inevitably cuts me open on a cold table? Maybe.

He doesn't stray too far from my side even when he isn't poking around. I eye him cautiously, but I don't mind this arrangement all that much. He hasn't hurt me yet—even when I screamed in his ears, even when I threw up on him—so my desire to keep my guard up keeps getting thwarted by an unknown attachment that is stranger to me than my current situation.

Even so, the certainty in my own cognizance makes it hard to breathe. The bodily dysphoria plaguing these little limbs and ill-fitting, large head, the singing child's toy hovering above my face, the whine of electricity in the illuminated room, the chilled air that brushes against my skin like a lover's touch: None of them deter my brisk, uneasy contemplation in the slightest.

The man exits my field of vision after some unnoticed time, leaving behind one last—affectionate? threatening?—touch before the room is one less person. I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

This is a really off day, I keep telling myself to keep calm, to keep busy. I close my eyes and fall into an exhausted, restless slumber. Tomorrow will be better.

Except the tomorrow I hope for never comes. The discomfort and confusion continue day after day, again and again and again, until 'off day' is simply 'every day.'

There comes a point in time when even I have to stop trying to convince myself that everything will be fine. The truth is a bitter pill to swallow.

From that point onward, I spend an immeasurable amount of time thinking, and between my waking hours and quiet dozing, the days and nights blend together until neither are distinguishable, until life is simply one wild trip through an endless loop of realizing how fucked I am and I'm the single unlucky, eternal passenger. My company returns often, touching and prodding and twisting me around like a doll in need of maintenance, repeating the same clockwork routine every time I open my eyes to his. When he leaves, I think. And I think. And I think.

And then—after an eternity and back amongst me and my thoughts alone—my second fully lucid thought: Fuck.

. . .

. .

.

As I've come to realize, he is nothing like the archetypical, hyperbolic personas my imagination spun at first. Otherwise, he would've strapped me down and cut me open already or given me experimental—and probably very illegal—superpowers by now.

He might just be my doctor, and this place might just be my empty residence. I also might just be going insane.

I'm grateful for this development, but moreover, I'm afraid of what this means for the reality of the situation.

. . .

. .

.

The room is white. The machinery is white. The lights are white. The blanket is white. The cradle is white. My clothes are white.

Everything about this room is white, down to every last nook and cranny—and it's blinding.

I can't move in this body, can't choose when or where my eyes droop to a close and my consciousness wanes, can't elude the white that invades my vision all day long. Scarcely am I in the presence of another human being other than my caretaker, whom I welcome eagerly for his warm touches that chase away the incessant cold when I am without him.

His uniform is also white, but his hair is rich and dark like the most bitter chocolate, his eyes a shimmering gold that pierces through my every attempt to ward off the hesitant affection I feel for him, his skin a healthy tan that stands out against the barren walls as proof of the life in his veins. Compared to my ghostly, fair skin that very nearly blends into the artificial lack of color, his is beautiful.

Every day is white, white, white. Not once have I left this room, so my only escape from it is through the blissful nothingness of sleep—but even that is only temporary.

All my life, I learned that white is purity. White is innocence. White is safe, soft, beautiful.

I know now that white is the scent of biting antiseptics. White is this miserable, dreary hospital room. White is quiet, stale, empty.

I hate the color already.

. . .

. .

.

His first mistake is bringing his face close to mine. His second mistake is assuming I can abstain from being a nuisance for even a single moment on the grounds that the distasteful medicine he piped down my throat ten minutes ago afflicts me with drowsiness. His third mistake is not moving away quickly enough.

I feel it happening before I can stop it. He catches on too late.

I cough in his face, practically retching out my innards, and somehow manage to sneeze the congestion right out of my body in one breath. The hand resting on my forehead to gauge my temperature falters, fingers twitching. There is a lull in his actions before he withdraws. He wipes the majority of the fluids and snot from his face with an alcoholic wet wipe and switches out his soiled mask for a fresh one. I barely catch a hint of pinched lips before the lower half of his face is covered again.

He looks surprisingly young. And cute. I think on that for exactly ten seconds before he repeats his mistake, this time with an ice-cold thermometer pressed into my armpit, and I cough all over him again.

He doesn't hit me or yell at me or decide that today is the day he cuts me open. Instead, he mutters something under his breath, turns away on his swivel chair, and turns back with another oral syringe in his hand, filled with what I can only assume is another disgusting fever reducer. He towers over me menacingly, plunging the end of the syringe into my mouth and pushing the medicine in with little warning. It takes every fiber of my being not to spit it back at his face, and I tell myself I won't, but the second it touches my tongue and I can taste the rotten flavor of bubblegum and cherry, I choke and puke all over myself. Again. It takes a few seconds to get my gag reflex under control.

With watering eyes, I look up at him and hold his incredulous stare. Here I am, sitting in a pool of my own vomit, snot, and drool, with a man I don't know, whose patience I seem to test with every breath I take. In his hand lies the half-empty syringe, frozen in place where it hovers by my face like a threat, and in his eyes is what reflects in mine: exhaustion.

He closes his eyes in a silent prayer.

. . .

. .

.

It takes a long time for me to finally admit that I'm a baby. A soft, squishy, gross baby that can't stop drooling, sleeping, or drooling and sleeping.

Had I not known this the moment I woke up that one frightful morning, then I would have realized it after my caretaker shoved a bottle against my lips, fed me chalk-like baby formula against my will, and burped me with as delicate a touch as one has when swatting insects. The satisfying belch all over his shoulder was well worth the rib-cracking pats.

My memories of a time before this are erratic at best. I remember the barest hints of a name, of a life before death, of a colorful world so different from this white womb that belongs to me as I belong to it. I see distant scenes of a faraway, foreign world as clearly as you would hear a low tune underwater, and to say it's not frustrating would make me a dirty liar.

The images haunt my waking moments and dance across my thoughts every time I close my eyes, drowning my clarity until it's anything but that—and yet I still reach out to them, hoping and praying that one day I might unravel the truth of what happened to me, of why I'm here, of how any of this is even real. I cling to their empty phantoms, knowing that's all they'll ever be.

I can't talk or move properly, can't stay alert for more than a few hours at a time, and it's a weakness I never knew until now. I'm trapped inside my own body, an unwilling prisoner left for hours on end to think, think, think.

Many religions believe in some form of an afterlife. A relative Heaven and Hell: One filled with tranquility, the other suffering. If this new life happens to fall under one of the two, I can't tell which one it is.

I've come to terms with the lost hope that this is all just a bizarre, uncomfortable, strangely realistic hallucination. Besides that, there are only a couple options for what this strange existence could be: either eternal peace, eternal suffering, eternal nothingness, or . . . reincarnation.

The concept of reincarnation—the unprecedented third choice apart from a simple existence after death or an end to consciousness once and for all—never occurred to me back then. Neither did anything else, for that matter. I wasn't devout in any sense and never committed to a belief, so maybe this is some deity's way of punishing me for my lack of faith.

I believed that death was simply death: an experience both simple yet indescribable. 'Maybe there's an afterlife, maybe there isn't.' In the end, it didn't matter to me. I was unattached, unaffected. I knew that life ended when it ended, so why bother worrying about something I might or might not be conscious for?

I know now that I knew nothing at all.

Of all four options, the last one makes the most sense. Eternal suffering comes as a close second, though.

I like to think that I led a fulfilling life, but in reality, I don't recall much. Some things I could never forget: the feeling of the sun against my skin, the breeze tousling my hair, the smell of brewing coffee and the sound of sizzling eggs on a pan and the taste of warm, crispy bacon. Others—the experiences that colored my life, what I looked like, the job I might have had, friends and family and more—are lost forever.

Perhaps cold-hearted, maybe even callous, but I don't find myself missing the latter all that much. I can't miss what I don't remember. Maybe it's for the best.

Hypothetically, I should miss the freedom of my old life the most. In practice, what I miss the most is real food. Bottled formula all day, every day, makes for an unhappy baby, but it's not like I can complain yet. The day will come, though.

I don't remember how or why I died, or if I died at all. What I remember is a vague imitation of a life barely strung together by threads, one tug away from letting everything fall to oblivion. It's a scrapbook with missing and torn pages, faces burned from photos and voices bleached away by the sun, haphazardly packed together like an improvised assortment of jigsaw pieces that were never part of an original set. The picture it creates is filled with gaping holes and mismatched images.

Indecipherable. Useless. Foreign.

Who I was, who I became, who I could have been: None of that matters anymore. I don't remember it, so it doesn't define me. Now, all I have is this soft, delicate body, and despite my physical age, I at least have enough brain cells to realize that I might not get another one if I die again. There's no guarantee that miracles happen twice—or if this is a miracle at all.

Even though this new life is just as bare as the walls that cage me in, I don't want to lose it.

. . .

. .

.

I can't understand him. He can't understand me. We meet in the middle with actions loud enough to drown out words, but that doesn't make him any less of an enigma to decipher, nor does it make him somehow capable of understanding me beyond the basic needs of my body.

If I could bottle up all the things I want to say but can't and smash said bottle over my caretaker's head until he finally gets it, I would. I can't, of course, but I'd do it in a heartbeat if given the chance.

. . .

. .

.

With nothing to do all day—

The slight jingle the knob makes that marks the arrival of my caretaker. The hush of the ventilation turning on after a period of rest, flooding the room with colder, drier air. The exact heat of each milk bottle and the thirty seconds it takes for it to be warmed, shaken, and shoved in my face. The stench of disinfectants that laces the stitches of my clothes and washes over every surface of the room. The never-ending repetition of cold and white and stale and quiet and confused and lonely and . . .

Needles and medicine, pills and checkups. Cabinets filled with cleaning supplies and disposable parts for tools used to probe my body: first the eyes, then the ears, then the mouth, then the chest, then the stomach, then . . .

Counting each mechanical ping to the fictitious tune it creates: one, two, ba-dum, three, ba-dum, ba-dum, four, five, six . . .

—it's impossible not to memorize each and every detail of my surroundings to the point where I'm more sure of how many threads make up my blanket than what color the sky is.

Why? Can't sleep because I already sleep too much. Can't talk because there's no one to talk to and no one who can understand me. Can't fiddle with my phone because there's simply no phone to be fiddled with.

How? Where there is a will, there is a way.

My days consist of drooling and eating and being a general nuisance without meaning to. Between this and that, observation comes naturally. Thanks to this abundance of unsolicited free time, I know a few things about myself now, whereas I hadn't the slightest clue before.

I have ten fingers and ten toes, two legs and two arms, a semi-functional body, a disproportionately huge head, and definitively female bits. My complexion might actually be paler than the walls. My voice is high-pitched and annoying, a constant reminder that I'm not actually me these days, so I try not to make noise. I hate too many things to count and I've already lost the will to try to change my mind. I miss a lot of things—but it's mostly just real food.

But for every one thing I know about myself, there are ten things I don't know.

I don't know what I look like. If asked, I couldn't give you my name, be it new or old. I know fuck all about who my parents are, never mind where they are. I'll probably never know why I've been given another chance at life. I can't speak this language well enough to ask why I'm stuck in this room or all the other unanswered questions running through my head that will, in all likelihood, remain unanswered.

It becomes abundantly clear that what I do know is outnumbered by what I don't know, and that the former really doesn't matter whatsoever in the grand scheme of things. Damn it.

Among the things that soon become common knowledge to me—the single note hum my caretaker makes when he wants me to open my mouth, the occasional rush of static from the baby monitor perched just out of arm's reach, the smell of baby powder and rash cream—is a feeling that transcends nausea, dizziness, and fatigue combined. If this is what glimpsing death over a prolonged period of time feels like, then I'm already there.

A cough that never goes away. An appetite that never stays. Energy that doesn't exist. Nausea that pursues like hounds on injured prey. Sometimes I feel normal. Most times I don't. Not even a good, hard nap resets the feeling of awfulness once it sets in for the day and withers my bones to dust.

Fact: Babies are useless and bothersome.

Another fact: I am somehow the bottom of that particular barrel.

I get sick so often that it might as well be my default mode. My caretaker fusses over me more than what should be humanly possible, as quick as lightning the moment I make a sound loud enough to register on the baby monitor. He's always attentive, always a magician with every possible trick up his sleeve, always ready with some new way to attend to my needs.

Diaper change? On it. Hungry? My bottle is already locked, loaded, and ready to fire. Tired? He can dim the lights with just his willpower alone, without putting me down or disturbing my drowsiness. Sick? Here are forty different pills that taste like ass but make the good vibes return.

Checkups are as routine as falling asleep. Feeding time is always accompanied by medicine, shots—not of the alcoholic variety, tragically—administered soon before sleep graces me. He probably thinks that my being drowsy makes the shots as painless and quiet as possible because I never fuss over the pinpricks that coincide with nap time, but little does he know that I feel every needle half-asleep as I would fully awake. It hurts, not that he would ever hear me cry over it, but I've had worse. I just don't take it like a little bitch.

As they say: been there, done that. What's one more needle in an endless sea of needles?

Even without having all the time in the world to myself, it isn't hard to see that something is wrong with me. I just don't know what yet.

I add one more thing to the short list of knowns: I'm so sick that I'm on the verge of being housebound.

I add one more thing to the unending list of unknowns: What am I sick with?

. . .

. .

.

When he burps me after a warm bottle of milk, his blows don't hurt nearly as much as they did before. The once empty cradle is now littered with pleasant toys and soft objects to play with. The bath water has since stopped scalding my skin, and the shampoo he used to rub my head raw with no longer drips into my eyes. His visits have grown more frequent, his touches softer than the unyielding steel they were at first.

The days spent in this room are lonely but comfortable because of him.

I shine under the look he gives me, his eyes filled with something I now recognize as endearment instead of scrutiny. His eyes are easy to read, more expressive than I could have ever thought possible for someone constantly covering half his face.

He tickles my sides, trying to elicit a peal of giggles from me like last time. It doesn't tickle, but I laugh along, all gums and spit and high-pitched squeaks. The words that spill from his lips are warm despite being unintelligible, but I've stopped caring about the trivial things.

He smiles at me. I learn to smile back—

Forced.

Then genuine.

Over time, natural.

. . .

. .

.

I wake up. I see him. I eat. I nap. I see him. I eat. I nap. I see him. I eat. I sleep. Repeat.

This is the core of my everyday schedule. Between sleeping and eating, I've done everything I possibly can in this room, alone, driven to madness from the never-ending onslaught of identical days with identical rituals and identical thoughts. The most exciting part of the day is when my caretaker graces me with his presence. Coincidentally, these happen to be the most painful parts of the day, given what follows are needles and uncomfortable checkups and gross, liquid medicines.

Those walls? I've already stared at them a million times over. That bottled milk? I'm so over it. Talking to myself in a language only I seem to understand? I've started holding conversations between me, myself, and I just to remind myself of what sanity feels like. The threads in my new blanket? Counted. The coughs? Eternal. His face? I love it, but I would like to think that after all this time, I'd have seen at least one more face other than his own.

Every day is the same, and yet I somehow have less to do now than I did before.

Less hope, less curiosity, less energy, less, less, less.

In my past life, I cherished sleep. Whatever little of it I could get, I loved to pieces. Sleep was a luxury, a treat for when time wasn't always running out, a drop of fresh water in the middle of the sea. Even a little of it was a soothing balm for days of unrest.

These days, I'm actually allowed to run away from my problems without it being seen as socially unacceptable, and run I do—right into the open arms of sleep. Sleep that doesn't already account for the multitudes of naps I take throughout the day to recharge the battery that runs this body despite its capacity being that of practically nothing. The pressing issues don't change much day-to-day, leading to the majority of my days being spent either asleep, bored, or embarrassed.

I sleep, and then I wake, and then I sleep, and then I wake. Nothing changes. Rather, each hour is sewn together as though I've merely shut my eyes for the moment, and when I reopen them, someone has added yet another identical strip of fabric to the never-ending quilt of my life.

Sleep doesn't invigorate me anymore. It doesn't leave me feeling confident and ready to breach the can of worms that is reality again. It doesn't make me feel like the world has reset and given me a clean slate. All it does is continue this monotonous cycle, repeating the same day over and over again—still as tired as yesterday, still as bored and sick as ever, still stuck in the same place I've always been.

I like to sleep more than having to bid my time staring at nothing, but I don't like sleep.

I sleep only to lose time. I sleep and the nightmare continues. It's as if I sleep but I can never truly wake up.

. . .

. .

.

My caretaker's hair grows longer, serving as the most accurate measure of time I have in this room.

This place has no clock, no calendar, no phone to discern whether a Friday has already become a Saturday or when a weekend slips into a weekday, and the ceiling lights never allow even the barest hint of sunlight the honor of dating my suffering, drowning out all natural daylight in exchange for waves of artificial, unnecessarily sharp phosphorescence.

None of my questions have been answered beyond the superficial, having been inferred rather than verified. Am I sick? Yes. Is this real? Yes. Is grass green? Yes. Have I finally gone mad? Yes—

I've grown, but not nearly enough. I long for the day when I can finally leave this room, when I can run forever and never look back, when I won't have to rely on someone else to be my arms and legs. Yesterday, I settled for rolling over on my own. Today, I settle for being able to sit, balanced, without toppling over. Tomorrow, and overmorrow, I won't settle for anything less than standing. In the days yet to come, when words finally have meaning and food is definitively more solid, I will never stoop as low as to settle.

My cradle was swapped for a crib when it became apparent that I could sit up on my own, though the paper-rough sheets and plastic underside to the mattress remain. The safety walls are high enough to keep me from tumbling out, akin to prison bars now that I view them from the inside. Even if I stand up, my full height would not be enough to tumble over and break my neck. I don't know if I should be thankful or not.

Instead of warm, bottled milk, I have equally as gross, but so much messier, baby food. The puke-green vegetable paste has never, is never, and will never be a fraction of what I consider tasty, but at least it isn't powdered formula. My worries have thus transferred from throwing up milk all over someone's shoulder to staining everything in sight with food because of my clumsy hand-eye coordination.

Some things are different compared to before, but has anything really changed?

The food is different, but I'm still better off eating actual shit.

The cramped cradle is long gone, but the crib is still made of bricks.

For all the medicine I take, my health doesn't seem to be getting any better.

No matter how much time passes, no one has come to visit me other than my caretaker.

My parents? Still absent. My life? Groundhog Day. My caretaker? Still putting up with me for some reason.

Months pass by like years in a daydream: If I shut my eyes and pretend nothing is wrong, then so it shall be.

. . .

. .

.

But just when I'd grown used to the monochrome that had swallowed me whole, the first droplet of color breaches what was once an impenetrable wall between myself and the world around me in the form of a single word: "Akihito."

I don't mean to say it, but it slips out on its own. Time seems to stop as the sound pierces the otherwise silent room like a hot knife through butter, quiet enough not to jar, but not so quiet that it disappears altogether once the moment passes.

My spit-laden lips smack together, forming the foreign word again but not quite letting it roll off the tongue just yet. My caretaker looks ready to faint, frozen in his tracks like a deer in the headlights, half-turned toward me with eyes as wide as dinner plates. My stomach flips, but the sudden courage surging through my veins prevents me from backing down despite every instinct in me screaming to run away.

"Aki—" My face scrunches up. How did it go again? "—hito." I pause, twice for good measure, before saying it again more confidently. I hear a loud gasp, and a spark of fear—did I pronounce it wrong? did I say something strange?—convinces me to feign interest in everything but him and pretend that never happened.

The owner of the name drops the clipboard occupying his hands on the edge of the nearby table and rushes toward me, scooping me up from the crib and babbling my ears away. His eyes glow with excitement, and I can feel his hands trembling around me, hyper-aware of his tense muscles and increasing volume.

He looks at me eagerly, almost as if he's—

—waiting for me to say it again?

I feel something giddy rise in me and splutter out his name again, and again, and again, quickly, urgently, until I choke on the desperate sound of my voice. He nods each time I say it right and chuckles when I mess up, letting out a sound of approval and encouraging me to continue with the eager look in his eyes. My heart almost soars from my chest at the feeling of finally being able to express something to another human being without having to cry to make a point.

For the first time in forever, everything feels right.

"Akihito," he says back to me, propping me against his hip with one arm and pointing at himself with his free hand. "Akihito!"

"Akihito," I agree, slapping his masked face with the meat of my palm. A manic grin develops on my face, pulling uncomfortably at the corner of my lips in an unfamiliar manner. My face feels stiff, but not in an unwanted way. "Akihito! Akihito!"

He makes a face when I say "Did I get it right?" in English despite knowing deep down that he still won't understand it, but whatever, it was worth a shot. My speaking English really freaks him out, but it doesn't matter anymore, not when I've finally got one foot in the door.

Somewhere between my saying his name and him turning to what I definitely know now is baby talk, the two of us had begun alternating between shouting his name at the top of our lungs—or, in his case, whisper-shouting it with a small cheer and an ever-growing smile—and him occasionally pointing at other objects in the room and trying to get me to repeat after him. I butcher everything except his name, but despite his efforts, there's really only one thing I want to say anyway.

"Akihito!"

He nods sagely and rocks me around the room, repeating, "Akihito!"

"Akihito!" Drool tumbles out my mouth. He laughs, and I allow him to dab it off my face without a fuss, noting his shaky fingers. My chest warms.

"Akihito!" He points to the crib, and whatever word he uses for 'crib' goes in one ear and right out the other in the moment.

Here we are, screaming his name like idiots because I can't say anything else and he—Akihito, now—doesn't know what else to say, and for some stupid reason, I wouldn't have it any other way.

My eyes burn. His smile grows wider under his mask, pinching the corner of his eyes in that friendly way that always disarms me. His voice is soft and sweet, so different compared to the harsh squeaks that make up mine. He says something familiar, but I don't understand any of it. I never understood him before, but I think I'm starting to.

I push back the hiccups, but in the typical style I roll with nowadays, I inevitably fail. My throat constricts, my heart hammers, my vision blurs. Soon, the name that leaves my lips like a prayer devolves into no more than tears and senseless blubbering. He chuckles at the fickle mood swings of a baby.

Akihito holds me close and rubs soothing circles against my back, whispering excitedly into my ear. I cling to him like my life depends on it, fisting the fabric of his shirt, and sniffle.

Akihito. That's all it took.

I said one word, one name, four damningly short syllables I wouldn't have known to piece together had he not pointed at himself and repeated 'A-ki-hi-to' for weeks at a time.

Damn him; the kindness in his every confusing action and incomprehensible word; the smiles I could have gone without if I had never known how warm they could be to begin with; the eyes that expressed to me what words could not; the hands that held me when my own parents had not and, for all I know, never will; and the name that finally escapes my lips and makes the world right again.

It's one name, and not even my name at that, but it manages to tinge the colorless world around me with the brown of his hair, the gold of his eyes, the tan of his skin, and all the colors that remind me that I'm not alone in this cruel, lonely room.

It's not much, but it's enough.

A/N: As it turns out, I'm not actually dead. I'm just really busy with work and school, so I've distanced myself from everything unrelated to those two things for my own good. I worked super hard on the chapter because despite being up to my neck in stress, a part of me just couldn't give up on this, so please tell me what you thought of it. I really do appreciate everyone's feedback. Also, I noticed that quite a lot of people panicked when I disappeared last time and sent me multiple PM's and reviews specifying their concerns, confusion, and general questions. I just wanted to let everyone know that the best way to reach me is through Discord. I tend to forget to reply on this platform, whereas you're almost always guaranteed a reply from me on Discord.

For more information about the story or status updates, or if you want a place to hang out and talk, feel free to join my Discord server. For snippets and other miscellaneous items, visit my Tumblr page. The links are in my profile.

See you all next time, hopefully.